Digital Life | How much data storage do you need?

3:43 PM,
Dec. 7, 2012

Written by

Kim Komando

Q. I'm shopping for a laptop. It seems like the amount of hard drive storage goes up with the price. How much do I really need?

A. Most non-professional users will be fine with 250 to 320GBs of storage. For example, 250GB can hold more than 30,000 average size photos or songs. If you're planning on storing movies, then you definitely want to upgrade to at least 500GB, maybe even 1TB. Granted, this is all for conventional hard drives. Solid-state drives rarely have more than 256GB, and those aren't cheap. If you want to buy a laptop with an SSD, buy as big as you can afford and then consider investing in ...